Here’s another poem from Love Songs to the Sun, out November 20th 2020.
Tag: queer author
and the knowledge we can linger
From Love Songs for the Sun, out November 20th.
Last week’s snippets
Last week I wrote a few poems, a few meditations, and a whole lot of a self-indulgent gothic romance. Here are a few of my favorite snippets.
A. You can want for nothing and still be unwanted. This was a thought that had crossed Evangeline’s mind at least once a week since her sixteenth birthday. Before that, she had small chance of noticing anything wrong with her little world. She’d had a caring nurse in Mrs. Fisher, then a kind governess in Miss Tulle. What had it mattered that her father rarely glanced her way? Why would she care if her mother seldom came back from town?
B. write about it
that moment you edge around
as if tracing the outline
can color the void
C. I want my house to tell you what you won’t learn from my lips. From the mask on the front door grinning with pride, spells spilling from his eyes, to the smell of rot emulsifying in the stomachs of my worms. Maybe you’ll spot the Venus fly traps, or maybe you’ll see a few flies and wonder what kind of mess you’ve befriended.
Tell me which intrigues you the most- a, b, or c. It may influence what I choose to continue.
The Visionary
Her fingernails snip the stems of daisies and dandelions as she dreams of rings. Another flower crown, another fairy ring, another circle of friends, another playground game. “What if we were a spaceship?” she asks the other kids. “I saw in a show they can make them this way. We could spin through space.” The grass isn’t green, but these flowers are hardy things. If they can survive the playground, surely they could survive space.
Her parents watch early morning shows. More murders, more police killing children. The suburbs are vast and strangers are frightening, so they drive her to school every morning. In class she practices hiding in case of a mass shooting. Under her desk some former student drew a flower. Another drew a rocket. She traces over them with her own pencil carefully.
What if I could grow spaceships? she thinks. While the teacher talks about closing blinds and escape routes, she draws a tree around the rocket, making it into something living. “What do bullets do to trees?” she asks, hand raised. “If we had school in trees would we be safe? What if we wore trees, if they grew around us like clothing? Could trees be spacesuits?”
She loves what thrives despite everything. Not her momma’s orchids and lilies, but weeds growing unwanted in the driveway. She makes a chain of dandelions grown entirely from concrete. She isn’t sure what it means, but wears them as a crown above her pigtails long after they fade. They are a force field, unlike her age. She feels, even this early, the weight of history. An inheritance of violence and greed, already turning against her. She knows, in her soft child way, that evil things loom heavy over her family, but her dandelions weave golden armor around her, and she walks through a world capable of healing.
Everywhere, growing things.
“What if?” she asks. She wants to know what space is. What it’s made of. What grows there. If it might be safer than here. Sometimes teachers know the answers. Sometimes they just want her to stop questioning.
She doesn’t. She asks librarians, asks her phone, asks everyone she meets. The dandelions taught her all about thriving. About wiggling into places no one wants you to be, or dreaming up schemes no one wants you to think. Eventually, like them, she’ll get what she needs.
“A torus spaceship is like a somersault,” she tells her friends. “The outside is moving, but inside you feel safe.” They tumble down a grassy hill and into space.
K. D. Hume 